I am a political economist at the University of St. Gallen and, for the 2026–27 academic year, a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. I study how the two great economic transformations of our time — the rise of artificial intelligence and the growing weight of accumulated wealth — are remaking what citizens expect from the state, and how institutions determine who experiences change as opportunity rather than threat.

I came to these questions by trying to measure what technology actually does to work. My earliest research built new cross-national measures of what workers do in their jobs and showed that automation does not hollow out labour markets everywhere: the same technologies produce different outcomes depending on the institutions they encounter. That finding turned my attention from the economics of technological change to its politics — from what machines do to jobs to what they do to the social contract. It is the question that has organised my work since my Oxford PhD, across three connected strands:

Artificial intelligence and the future of work. Using pre-registered experiments and original surveys, I study how working with generative AI changes both productivity and politics. Hands-on exposure to AI, it turns out, breeds not anxiety but sociotropic support for an active welfare state (Journal of European Public Policy), and AI’s equalising effects on productivity are limited to specific occupations but do not extend to the labour market at large. To help build this emerging field, I convene panels at APSA, EPSA, and SASE, organised the 2025 Politics of AI workshop at Nuffield College, and am editing a special issue in Comparative Political Studies.

Education and skill formation. Skills are the hinge between economic change and individual life chances. My work shows that vocational education and training shapes not only wages — dual training compresses them (Journal of European Social Policy) — but also politics: it weakens automation-driven demand for compensation (British Journal of Political Science), even as families across Europe continue to treat VET as the second-best option (Sociology of Education).

Wealth and housing. Where wealth increasingly determines life chances, housing becomes a political fault line. With colleagues from the ERC project WEALTHPOL, I show that housing wealth helps explain why taxing wealth remains electorally so difficult (World Politics) and shapes whether citizens feel heard by the political system (West European Politics).

I received my PhD in Social Policy from the University of Oxford in 2022. Before joining the GOVPET Leading House at the University of St. Gallen, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher on WEALTHPOL at Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College, where I remain an Associate Member. From 1 September 2026, I will be in residence at Harvard’s Center for European Studies.

My research is comparative by conviction and methodologically pluralist: cross-national surveys, pre-registered experiments, text analysis, and new datasets built for the questions at hand. Because these questions matter beyond the seminar room, I regularly discuss my findings with policymakers, practitioners, and journalists.

I am on the academic job market in 2026–27, seeking positions starting in autumn 2027. If you would like to learn more, feel free to reach out via email, LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky.